The yearning for democracy and freedom remain alive in China following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, a prominent Chinese political dissident and social activist said ahead of the 25th anniversary of the incident.
“The ‘flames’ of freedom and democracy were extinguished in China that year, but the ‘fire’ was passed on,” Hu Jia (胡佳), who remains under house arrest, told the Central News Agency in a telephone interview.
Especially anxious this year because it is the 25th anniversary of the massacre, Chinese authorities have prolonged the “stability maintenance period,” said Hu, who has been closely monitored by the authorities since January.
He has only been allowed to leave his home twice a month to be treated at a hospital for a liver ailment.
The 40-year-old said he was not afraid to be jailed and was ready to face any adversity ahead, adding that many people inevitably have to pay the price if a country is to walk toward democracy.
Compared with his parents, who were labeled as rightists during Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Anti-Rightist Movement, “what I have suffered is nothing,” he said.
Hu said he envies Taiwan’s free and democratic society, but warned that Taiwan will not be able to safeguard its freedom and security unless China also becomes a democracy.
He said he was aware of Taiwan’s White Terror era, referring to the authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime’s persecution of political dissidents in Taiwan for nearly four decades until the lifting of martial law in 1987.
However, “the Chinese Communist Party’s Red Terror rule of China is even worse than the White Terror era,” he said.
The European Parliament awarded its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Hu in 2008, when he was still serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.”
He was released in June 2011, but is currently under house arrest in Beijing.
The Tiananmen Square Massacre, commonly known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese, remains a taboo subject in China.
After weeks of pro-democracy protests in 1989, Chinese troops and tanks fired on civilians at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundreds to thousands.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching